Josiah Wilbarger’s Vision

Josiah Pugh Wilbarger (1801–1844 or 1845, depending on the source) came to Stephen F. Austin’s colony in 1827 and worked as a surveyor and a teacher. In August 1833 he was part of a small surveying party attacked about four miles east of what is now downtown Austin. The Handbook of Texas, published by the Texas State Historical Association, says only that he was scalped and left for dead, and that he was found the next day by Reuben Hornsby, who took him to the Hornsby home. Later accounts attribute the attack to Comanche warriors. Wilbarger survived and lived roughly eleven years more.

The part of the story that made it a ghost tale was told by the folklorist J. Frank Dobie in Tales of Old-Time Texas and repeated by later writers. According to it, Wilbarger, badly hurt, sat beneath a tree and saw his sister, who he believed was far away, tell him that help was on the way and that he should stay where he was. Months later he learned that she had died, in the versions told today, the day before the attack. Meanwhile, at the Hornsby settlement, the survivors insisted everyone else was dead, but Sarah Hornsby reported dreaming that Wilbarger was alive under a tree with cloth over his head. In the Texas Escapes version of the tale she dreamed it three times, each more detailed, until her husband took a wagon and found Wilbarger just as she had described.

The record and the legend are not the same, and it matters which is which. The state history and cemetery pages agree on the attack, the rescue and the survival. The vision and the dream rest on retellings, chiefly Dobie’s, plus family tradition: the Texas Escapes writer, C. F. Eckhardt, says he had the story from his grandmother, who had it from the Hornsby family. Details differ between versions, including the dream’s timing, the date of Wilbarger’s death, and who attacked the party. The Texas State Cemetery, where he and his wife were reburied in 1932, retells the dream and the vision and calls the account a legendary tale.

Wilbarger’s story belongs to a long tradition of crisis apparitions, in which someone close to a dying or injured person seems to appear to them or to someone else. It is remembered in Central Texas for the survival as much as for the supernatural touch.

A vision of a sister who had died far away, speaking to a wounded man; and a woman’s repeated dream that located him. The accounts come from family tradition and from Dobie’s retelling.

Beneath a tree near the Colorado River east of present-day Austin, and at the Hornsby settlement nearby.

Dobie’s Tales of Old-Time Texas brought the story to a wide audience, and it is a staple of Texas pioneer lore. A woodcut of the attack appeared in J. W. Wilbarger’s Indian Depredations in Texas.